Spring/Summer 2002, Volume 19.3

Poetry

Virgil Suárez

Virgil Suárez
was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1962, has lived in the United States since 1974,
and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Florida State University. He
is the author of four novels as well as four collections of poetry. His
memoirs, Spared Angola:
Memories of a Cuban-American and
Childhood and Café
Nostalgia: Writings from the Hyphen,
chronicle his life of exile in both Cuba and the United States. His essays,
stories, poems, and translations have appeared in TriQuarterly,
Poetry London, Parnassus, Poetry Wales, Imago, Field, Cimarron,
and many others.

Trabalenguas

I knew a
red-haired girl
once who could tie a cherry
stem in her mouth.

Once she finished, the knot
perched on her lips, a broken
promise. She spoke Arabic,

Spanish, Chinese, her father'd
been a diplomat. When she drank
she liked to lean back and roll

a million ash-colored
birds aflutter.
When she stared at me I could
feel her words rumbling

through, a distant thunder, blush
blue, even through the years she's
been gone, this woman of fire

words, queen of trabalenguas

Gossamer Cosmos

How many thermometers did I break open
on my mother's
dining room table to watch
the mercury run between the cracks,
globules
of magic that melded and fused into each
other,

or escaped from under the push of my finger-
tips, this silver-flash
radiance of a chemical
years later I heard poisoned men in Japan
through fish they ate. Everything kills
us.

What doesn't
do it fast, does it slowly, as if
a magician in front of you is tugging out
lengths
of gossamer scarves, a rainbow of them
that keeps flowing, spilling as he pulls
and yanks.

I remember those days in the early 1960s in
Cuba,
burnt into my mind like some sepia
filter, a boy
in funny-looking shorts,
mother-sewn, scalloped
hair cut my father called malanguita. How many

things did I not break, or ruin in my grasp?
Once
I stuck my head between the wrought iron
bars
of the front gate, and Manuel, my father's
friend and neighbor, had to saw one off
to free me.

Then there was the electric meter with its
circular,
rotating dial I thought was a train, its
black
interspersed ticks freight of another
life,
my life of imagination. I stood away
afternoons

there by the back fence and spent hours
watchingthat dial whirl like the moon. Once, too,
I whistled
and set the chickens aflutter. My
grandmother
peeked her head out of her bedroom window—

she asked what I was doing. I told her I was
riding
on a train into the Arabian desert, where
camels
stampeded down sandy slopes to disappear
in mist.
I was a child of seven then. As a man I
believe

in magic, still, the way I will get up and walk
out
into my garden to find gossamer spiders
busied
themselves through the night, built these
webs
between leaves of grass. Tiny tents they
have left

on the trail for me to find, links back to my
origins.

Recitative of Jackson Pollock's Love Affair with Gravity

When the paint brush becomes a lasso,
paint forms vectors stampeding across
a canvas strewn on a hard floor, rock-
solid surfaces beckoned to him, drips

coiled and whipped away from his fingers,
these lightning bolts of color, splashed
and spawned in layers, spirochetes,
paramecium specks in a vortex of time

and sensibility. Some say he was possessedby demons, and surely, these baptisms
in paint and stroke made a saint of him—
Who submerges, comes clean. Who loses

concentration, plummets deeper in hell.
The cigarette dangling in the corner of
his
mouth would sometime burn near his lips,
a reminder of how much time he'd swallowed.

The canvas at his feet writhed, wrinkled,stretched into infinity—a
whirlwind of paint
splashed and dripped reds, blues, blacks—
these colors of possession, a demon cut
free.

La Frontera y La Distancia/The Border and the
Distance

Aqui donde where if you split
a rock,
a black bird will emerge, its wings
iridescent indigo,
moist from the hatching, a train track
crosses the land,
a serpent which divides the earth into
two: on that side,
a golf course designed by some famous,
not-yet-dead
gringo golfer, and on this one a shanty
town of card
board and tin houses sloped like bad
teeth
on the valley-mouth of
this region.

The children play in the river, they swim
like fish, their skin growing razor-sharp
scales. Over
time they have learned to stay under when
the border
patrol comes through. When the coast is
clear,
they emerge and cross the tracks, leaving
a trail of wet
tracks. They have learned to follow those
blackened
birds they raise from the rocks. In this
heat, the children
harvest the rocks by pricking a finger
with a cactus needle
and letting the smooth stones drink their
blood-water.

At night the rocks glow like lava. This is the
sign
of living rocks. Some say they hear the
children singing
like those birds in the distance. The
ones that have learned
to cross all borders.